AWS Summit: Has Cloud Become 'The New Normal'?

AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy discussed the cloud services market, his company's growth over the past year and other cloud topics during his keynote address at the AWS Summit in San Francisco. Here's everything you need to know.

Cloud has become "the new normal" and is transforming how many businesses operate, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Senior Vice President Andy Jassy.

Jassy discussed the cloud services market, his company's growth over the past year and other cloud topics during his keynote address at the AWS Summit in San Francisco. He also pointed out that the cloud is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

"It's really hard to fight gravity," he told attendees. "The cloud is providing all of us and companies with an unbelievable opportunity to completely reinvent their businesses … and do so much faster than ever before."

In addition, Jassy made several announcements at the AWS Summit – here are five key takeaways from Jassy's keynote address:

AWS previews Amazon EFS – Jassy unveiled Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a fully managed file system for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EFS ensures applications "have the storage they need, when they need it," according to AWS. "It's simple, it's really fast to set up, it's built to integrate with all your existing apps … and the pricing model is simple," Jassy said. "And there are no upfront costs, no commitments and you only pay for the storage you consume." Jassy also said he expects a preview version of Amazon EFS to be available this summer.

Introducing AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps – Jassy provided details about AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps, which offers "a broad selection of desktop apps that are available ... that you can consume by the month." The marketplace, which launched this week, already features over 100 desktop apps and monthly billing options as well.

Amazon EC2 and C3 usage increasing – Jassy pointed out that there was a 93 percent year-over-year increase in Amazon EC2 instance usage between the fourth quarters of 2013 and 2014. Also, he noted that there was a 102 percent year-over-year increase in data transferred to and from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) during that time frame.

AWS shows "rapid pace of innovation" – 516 new AWS features and services launched last year, Jassy said, and AWS continues to innovate. "You don't want a circa 2010 cloud platform," Jassy added. "Companies want all of the capabilities of the leader because they want the whole enchilada."

So what should businesses expect from the cloud going forward? Jassy said cloud computing represents "the biggest technology shift in our lifetime," and as a result, many companies are likely to move the majority of their workloads to the cloud.

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